A Home Where Bloggers Can Plumb Those Obscure Passions

The jerky publishing industry churns out precious few books on the topic, magazines and newspapers never give dried meat its due and reality television hasn't quite caught up to it.

But blogging about jerky could be just the ticket.

Late last month a new Internet site, Squidoo.com, began offering Internet authors the chance to earn money on their obscure expertise, be it on taxidermy, vegetarianism or, yes, jerky (www.squidoo.com/jerky/).

The idea is to harness the knowledge that bloggers typically offer the world, but which average readers might struggle to find on their own. And while the site is not old enough to judge as a success or failure, it helps point to the enormous opportunity Internet entrepreneurs see in Web sites that are built on the postings of average people, as MySpace was, and the continuing zeal among users to publish their ideas online.

"Blogs by themselves just aren't that interesting," said James Nail, the chief marketing officer of Cymfony, a consulting firm based in Watertown, Mass. "But if you combine them with other features and keep them to specific topics, you could make the idea of consumer-generated media even more mainstream than it is now."

Squidoo, which is based in Irvington, N.Y., features more than 21,000 so-called lenses, or sites devoted to various subjects, with many more being added daily. Each lens author is responsible for his postings, and according to Squidoo's chief executive, Seth Godin, the site offers technology that is intended to make the pages easier for authors to maintain -- and more useful to readers -- than conventional blogs.

For instance, if an author builds a lens around the band U2, Squidoo lets the author easily plug in a module showing the best-selling U2 CD's on Amazon or links to new blog postings on the same topic.

"That way, the site is updated every day without you having to do anything," said Mr. Godin, an author on marketing and the founder of Yoyodyne, a marketing company that Yahoo acquired in 1998. "Whereas if someone was at your blog two weeks ago and you haven't changed anything, they won't want to come back."

Why link to blogs on the same topic? Mr. Godin said Squidoo lenses were meant to function as jumping-off points on a subject, not a place to hunker down for any length of time. But if readers come to trust a certain Squidoo expert on that topic, they may return to visit lenses on other topics too and, perhaps, click on advertisements on Squidoo pages or buy products from Amazon, CafePress or other online retailers that are linked on the site.

When consumers do something along those lines, Squidoo collects a commission, typically 5 to 15 percent, and gives half to the author who brought about the sale. (Advertising revenue is pooled for the entire site before it is split, which prevents authors from clicking ads on their own pages to drive up their take.)

Since a test version of the site started in December, Mr. Godin said that Squidoo had attracted more than 650,000 visitors. Based on that level of traffic, Mr. Godin said a lensmaster "might make a buck a day, while the bad ones might be a penny. It's not a lot until you consider you can have 100 lenses if you want."

Competition is at the core of Squidoo's approach. If someone has already posted what they believe is the authoritative lens on a topic and someone else tackles the same subject, Squidoo will track the two to see which is more popular and rank it first whenever someone searches for that subject. Squidoo will also suggest that lens to readers who are exploring related topics.

As a result of the competition, authors have the incentive to market their lenses -- and, thus, the site -- as widely as possible.

The idea of paying online authors for their expertise is not new, of course. On Epinions.com, which is a unit of eBay's Shopping.com, self-styled product experts are paid according to the usefulness of their reviews to readers. Judy's Book, a guide to local merchants that made its debut last year, gave away iPods to people who contributed multiple reviews to the service in its early days.

Likewise, there is little new about a site that claims to offer expertise on far-flung subjects. About.com, which is owned by The New York Times, is among the most successful of these sites, ranking among the 50 most-visited Web sites.

Mr. Nail, of Cymfony, predicted Squidoo "will certainly put a dent in About, which is still clinging to that old editorial model where an intermediary vets the authors, then tells readers 'Here's someone worth listening to.' " He added that "blogs are showing that credibility is granted not by some media mogul, but by the collective opinion of consumers."

Scott B. Meyer, About.com's chief executive, agreed that the company's approach was "much closer to the traditional publishing model" than Squidoo's, but he said that was its strength.

"We recruit our guides, we credential them, we train them, we have an ethics policy they adhere to," he said. "As Squidoo emerges as a way to help people find content, that's great. About is the largest publisher of original content on the Web."

Another vintage Internet site that Squidoo could challenge for traffic is eHow, which attracted $30 million in venture capital financing before the dot-com bust, then changed hands twice in what amounted to online fire sales.

Now eHow attracts 5.5 million visitors a month and is being run by three part-time employees and two freelance editors, who update and oversee tens of thousands of how-to articles that were largely written by eHow's staff during the boom. Jack Herrick, eHow's co-owner, said he thought Squidoo's approach could do very well.

"I'm not convinced either of our sites is 100 percent the right answer," Mr. Herrick said. "I think there's certainly room for both models."

In gleaning readable content from mostly untrained authors, Squidoo will have plenty of competition. Technorati.com, a blog search service, lets users set up a page of favorite bloggers and updates that page whenever the authors publish something new.

Derek Gordon, Technorati's director of marketing, acknowledges that service may not be convenient for the user who wants to get a quick view of the Web's best wisdom on a particular topic.

"Right now, it's all a little clunky," he said of his service and that of other companies. "The next step is figuring out how to provide the maximum amount of editorial control for users. But that's a tough nut to crack."